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Condo towers = gentrification

Download the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) ad-hoc report on the Chinatown heights review: Chinatown is people, not just buildings or view all the sections of the report in the sidebar under "Chinatown Social Impact Report"

UPDATE: The hearings are over, the votes are in... the community fight against gentrification and for the soul of the city continues!

Everyone's favorite speaker Homeless Dave addresses council at the last hearing on April 14th

April 19, 2011

Vancouver City Council votes to gentrify Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside

VANCOUVER
– Today Vancouver City Council approved the plan to increase building
heights in the Chinatown sub-district of the Downtown Eastside (DTES).
The “Historic Area Heights Review” (HAHR) plan increases overall
building heights in all of Chinatown except Pender Street to 9 stories,
without application, and to 15 stories on the Main Street corridor and
12 stories in the rest of the area by application.

One
hundred and sixty-seven people spoke at 5 public hearings about the
HAHR. The great majority of these speakers were low-income residents of
Chinatown and the DTES and supporters of the low-income community, all
who whom spoke out against the plan.

Explaining
why he opposed the motion to increase heights in Chinatown, Councillor
David Cadman said that he heard Chinatown business leaders point to
gentrification pressures coming into the DTES from the West. He said
that the council decision to encourage and subsidize condo development
in Chinatown will mount similar real estate market pressures from the
south and will drive real estate speculation in the poorest community in
the country. Fraser Stuart, a DTES resident and member of the Downtown
Eastside Neighbourhood Council (DNC) board of directors agreed. After
sitting in on all five public hearings and the final council meeting
Stuart said, “I feel like I live on a chessboard and the city and the
developers are playing together to take over my home.”

Mayor
Gregor Robertson explained why he supported the motion to increase
heights, “Saying no to the Chinatown neighbourhood who has brought this
forward will only increase divisions in the DTES.” Ivan Drury, a DNC
board member and DTES resident who lives on the eastern border of
Chinatown wondered if Robertson had been at the same hearings he had.
Drury said, “I was at all the five public hearings and I did not hear
even one Chinatown resident speak in favour of the heights increase.
City staff started the hearing process saying that heights were
unanimously supported by “Chinatown”, and today they made their decision
to exclude the low-income residents of Chinatown from that community.”

Wendy
Pedersen, also a resident of the DTES and board member of the DNC, who
has been working on the Local Area Planning Process that council
initiated in January, said, “This is going to make our work uniting the
DTES community behind a community development plan much, much harder. We
tried to say, come on you guys, give us some time and we can save the
heritage buildings and get good housing for Chinese seniors.”

Pedersen
explained that the heights increase will negatively affect the whole
DTES, “Vision councilors voted to gentrify the Downtown Eastside.
Council just foisted 12 to 15 story towers on us and this will cause bad
ripple effects like property value increases, rent increases, more
yuppie stores. The end result is poor people get pushed out.”

Homeless
Dave, a DTES resident who, on the first night of public hearings
threatened that more gentrification would create a “little Tunisia” in
the streets of the DTES. After the decision to increase heights in
Chinatown he said, “City council has finished the easy part, they passed
a zoning change in City Hall. The hard part is yet to come. What
developer will dare be the first to come down and fight the low-income
community in our neighbourhood?”

The low-income community's three-year long fight against gentrifying
building heights increases in the Downtown Eastside hit a high pitch in
the first few months of 2011. Against the city's "Historic Area Heights
Review" (HAHR) we argued that the low-income community in the DTES would
be devastated by the plan to land more and higher condo towers in the
neighbourhood. The HAHR went before city council twice in these months,
and although city council finally voted for the HAHR in Chinatown and
against us, the DNC and CCAP are organizing a party to celebrate the
beautiful coalitions we built in the fight against these proposals.

CELEBRATION OF OUR FIGHT AGAINST THE CHINATOWN TOWERS SUNDAY JUNE 12Entertainment program starts: 6pmDinner: 6:45pmRUSSIAN HALL(600 Campbell Ave, in Strathcona)

This
venue is wheelchair accessible and there will be a "handicapped
port-a-potty" restroom facility available just outside the building.

Bring
food to add to a potluck if you can, if not then just bring your
beautiful self. An amazing volunteer food-crew is preparing a feast that
everyone's potluck additions will add to.

(See more details, like the entertainment program, below the image)There
will be a chance for some speeches and reminiscences from the stage,
but the focus of the night is a celebration of our community's
strengths, and to reinvigorate ourselves for the coming battles because
the fight against the condo towers is far far from over! So that means
there will be more music and poetry than speech-making, and lots of time
for mingling, eating, and chatting with each other.

Final report on the Chinatown Towers Decision
What happened? What's next? Yes, a party! Read on to find out more.

We lost the vote on the towers in council 9 to 2. After a three year
struggle, culminating in a series of dramatic decisions in January and March
of 2011, Council decided to go forward with staff's recommendation to change
the zoning policy in the DTES's historic area to allow applications for
potentially 5 fifteen storey towers along Main in Chinatown and an unknown
number of twelve storey towers that will likely increase rents in the
surrounding areas and wipe out our low-income shopping streets in Chinatown.

But we put up a stellar fight.

An amazing amount of organizing was done to draw the low-income community
together, including Chinese speakers, around this issue and those strong
relationships will serve us all very well in the future. Plus we did get a
few concrete things as a result of the 3 year struggle against the Historic
Area Height Review, like shorter, fewer towers and a couple of towers that
look like they'll be stalled for awhile. And, although it is hard to get
excited about this, we did gain some potential tools that could stop future
towers in other parts of the area and could mitigate the impacts of existing
and impending towers on the low-income community -- the social impact study
and co-chair-ship of the local area planning process.

A big thank you to.

Chinatown residents, DTES residents and supporters who turned out to speak
at City Hall in droves.you gave your history, analysis and personal stories
so freely, with passion and intelligence, in the hopes of influencing city
councils decision on the towers. Ivan is putting together a booklet of your
amazing speeches (please send them to us) and we're planning a party for you
all!

And, thanks to..

..CCAP members and the DTES Neighbourhood Council for their analysis,
reports and organizing of actions leading up to the decision; thanks to all
the groups that signed the resolutions and spoke against the towers; thanks
to the Aboriginal Front Door Drummers and to the many speakers and
performers at our city hall rallies; thanks to Dave, Richard, Beth, Stan and
others for their research and report on the "Zones of Exclusion", to Murray
and Tami for pics and articles in the Vancouver Media Co-op, Sid for his
fantastic you tubes of tabling in Chinatown, Harsha for her article
published in the Sun and to Nate and Tristan for their Mainlander articles;
thanks to Richard, Stacey, Paul, Fraser and Fred who knocked on virtually
every low-income resident's door in Chinatown, twice!; thanks to Craig,
Bob, Rider, Dave and Steven for shuttling seniors to city hall and for
bringing food and water and to Grant for bus tickets; thanks to Rider, Ray,
Kirsten, Yifan and Claudia for petitioning Chinatown businesses and to the
big gang that worked the tables collecting signatures on petitions; thanks
to the Tangs for their spirited speeches that roused the crowds and for
their work with the media; to Steven, Eugene, Jeff, Nick, Willeen, Elise,
Clint and the other academics who spoke at council and to the media and also
thanks to the folks that are teaching us about zoning, and who stood up for
planning process that are fair to all: Joe, Dan, Ned and Bette of
Neighbourhoods for Sustainable Vancouver and Ray of Building Communities
Society.

And a special thank you to...

COPE Councillors Woodsworth and Cadman for their great questions, speeches
and vote against the towers at the end of the debate.

3) History of the Historic Area Height Review. Many of you were part of
various stages of this 3 year fight! Remember how the city started with a
proposal for 16 towers in the Historic Area? Go to this page for the full
story:https://sites.google.com/site/fightfor10sites/hahrhist

Backgrounder CITY
COUNCIL HAS HELD PUBLIC HEARINGS ON MARCH 17TH, APRIL 5TH, APRIL 7TH, APRIL 12TH, AND 14TH ABOUT A CITY STAFF PROPOSAL TO INCREASE CONDO TOWER
HEIGHTS IN CHINATOWN...

Around
64% of Chinatown residents are low-income; there are around 1,000
people in close to that many rooms. There are at least 10 private hotels
and two major cheap apartment buildings in Chinatown that would be
vulnerable to rent increases from the ripple effects of condo towers.
This community is vulnerable to the ripple effects of gentrification,
especially considering that many of them are seniors.

The
ripple effects of gentrification cause real estate prices to go up.
The same way that rents go up for hotel residents, they go up even more
for small businesses that serve the low-income community. The cheap
grocery stores we shop at (and which many community seniors rely on)
could be replaced with fancy restaurants and boutiques. Raise welfare
and pension rates and the community will spend more in the shops we
love.

The
only people who heights increases will help are non-resident
millionaire developers whose condo sales profits will increase with
every foot of added density in their projects.

WHAT'S AT STAKE?

The community opposition led by low-income DTES
residents had some major victories on January 20th. See the Downtown
Eastside Neighbourhood Council statement on what happened at the January
20th council meeting here and the CCAP statements here and here

On March 12th the first meeting of the Chinatown Residents Committee was held at the Carnegie Theatre. Read the declaration drafted at that meeting and read by Chinese Canadian National Congress president Sid Chow Tan at the press conference co-organized by DNC and CCAP on March 14.

Council
moved that a Local Area Planning committee should be convened for all
of the DTES in order to protect the low-income community... except for
in the Chinatown sub-district. That's right; there are 8 sub-districts
in the DTES and seven of them should be covered by the local area plan,
but not Chinatown. So that means:

The 99
W. Pender (Budget car rental site), recommended to go from 7 stories
allowed last year to 15 recommended in the report has been STOPPED.

The 425 Carrall (B C Electric Building); recommended to go from 7 stories allowed last year to 15 in the report has been STOPPED.

But, in the Chinatown sub-district of the DTES, Council
has decided to throw caution to the wind and sacrifice the low-income
community to the gods of condo development. The recommendations for
heights increases will go to a public hearing, including that towers in
Chinatown South go from 9 stories allowed last year to 12 stories,
except
for Main Street between Keefer and Union which can go up to 15stories. It seems like Council does not value the low-income community in Chinatown.

The link to the 98 page city report is still mostly applicable, except for those areas outside of Chinatown.

Between February 1 and March 17 2011 the DNC collected more than 1,000 signatures against the Chinatown towers. See the petition signatures here